Moonlight 1.0 available in Beta 1

[Jackie]

The Microsoft Silverlight platform, presented as a major competitor environments Flash, Flex and Adobe AIR is a set of technologies to increase interactivity with the web page and run rich Internet applications (RIA). The good news is that Linux users will also have a similar plugin.

To this end, Miguel de Icaza, founder of the GNOME graphical desktop environment for Linux, works with Novell under the Mono project to bring the technology of Silverlight for Linux. Called Moonlight, the first tests began last May and now the first beta is available for download.

Moonlight is in the form of a plugin for Firefox coded in C + + which increases the capacity of the browser's JavaScript engine. When the user arrives on a web page requiring specific video codecs, a message appears on the screen offering to download them.

According to the roadmap of development, the final version of Moonlight will be available from January 20 next. From early March 2009, the first alpha Moonlight 2.0 will be distributed.

Moonlight download the plug-in version 1.0 beta 1 here

[Jeffrey]

The teams of the open source Mono project, sponsored by Novell, has announced the launch of Moonlight 1.0. Its purpose is to give Linux users access to content in Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 and Windows Media content. Adobe Flash competitor, Silverlight enables you to create rich Internet applications, the key performance multimedia content and graphics quality, within a web browser or directly on the user's desktop. Moonlight is the result of technical collaboration between Microsoft and Novell. "We worked with the team of Moonlight and Novell to enable interoperability between Windows and Linux," said Scott Guthrie, Vice-President the development division. NET at Microsoft, in a statement.

Available for Linux distributions the most common

Moonlight 1.0 is available as a plug-in for Firefox 2.0 or Firefox 3.0. The software uses a set of codecs under license from Microsoft to play Windows Media Video, Windows Media Audio and MP3. It is available for major Linux distributions, including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat and Ubuntu, both in architecture 32 bit 64 bit. Moonlight also integrates with Banshee, player audio / video open source also sponsored by Novell.